Robotic exploration of Mars has yielded tantalizing clues about what was once a water-soaked planet. Deep beneath the soils of Mars may lie trapped frozen water, possibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms. Climate change on a vast scale has reshaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes. And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars and then on the Red Planet’s surface.
Mobilizing the space program to focus on a human colony on Mars while at the same time helping our international partners explore the moon on their own would galvanize public support for space exploration and provide a cause to inspire America’s young students. Mars exploration would renew our space industry by opening up technology development to all players, not just the traditional big aerospace contractors. If we avoided the pitfall of aiming solely for the moon, we could be on Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight.
Nope, the best way to study Mars is with robots. Those Mars rover missions cost about $250 million a pop. An optimistic estimate puts the price of sending humans to Mars at $160 billion (and others think it could cost as much as a trillion dollars). That’s 640 Mars rover missions.
I really hope that Obama kills this mission to bars Mars and the space shuttle program, both of which are titanic wastes of money. Just because Gregg Easterbrook agrees doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Maybe Tim F will write a post saying I’m an idiot for not realizing the genius of sending men to Mars, but I just don’t see how it makes sense to talk about a trillion dollar vanity project when a trillion dollars is apparently too much to spend to give everyone health insurance. And when the trillion dollar vanity project has no more scientific merit than radically cheaper robotic missions.
jp2
Naw. Mankind was meant to explore and we’re out of places on Earth.
General Winfield Stuck
I think we should practice our colonization on the Moon first, and learn much more about keeping people in space for long periods of time, before sending humans off to Mars. Plus, that shit takes too long without Warp Drive.
Andrew
Mars, bitches, is right. We need to go there if we want to survive as a species over the long term. The only question is when we should go. I’d guess that we need to be there within 20 years.
Scott
“I really hope that Obama kills this mission to bars…..”
I must respectfully disagree. We must continue these programs; the knowledge gained far exceeds the cost. If Obama does kill it, I will still continue my life long research….
So many bars, so little time.
Cheers,
S
Ben
Huh, I seem to be the first commenter to take your side. Maybe some day it’ll be worth it, but for the foreseeable future it’ll probably be cheaper and more egalitarian to deal with Earth’s problems on Earth, as opposed to camping out on desolate rocks in space. Unmanned missions are fine for now.
Nellcote
More Hubble Telescopes please.
hubblesite.org/gallery/
Geoduck
Should we go to Mars tomorrow? No. Should we try and get there someday? Absolutely. As GWS says, getting back to the Moon is the first logical step. Safer, easier and a lot cheaper.
Comrade Kevin
At some time, in the future, spending tons of money to go to Mars may be a good idea.
Right now? Not so much.
jrg
I hear there are chocolate waterfalls on Mars. There are also pony unicorns… and the air on Mars makes your penis larger.
DougJ
Bingo. And that’s just the kind of smart, cheap program that the Mars mission would cannibalize.
General Winfield Stuck
Manned space flight and the engineering inventions that have come from it, has contributed much to offset the cost, by making shit we use every day. Plus we need a new world to pollute with big bidness.
Ting Tang
Walla Walla
Bing Bang
Comrade Kevin
@DougJ: Exactly. The Hubble Space Telescope is probably just about the most successful space program in the history of the world.
mogden
A trillion dollars? Who the hell cares about that any more. At least we can go to Mars.
shecky
Sorry, Buzz. Homesteading Mars? A tiny outpost on Mars for a handful of astronauts is a far cry from homesteading, and will need a virtual umbilical cord to Earth to be sustainable. Imagine the kind of investment needed to create a self sustaining Mars station capable of supporting just a few humans. And for what? Research that can be be done much more cost effectively using robots? Sure, technology in life support will get better in the next 60 years. But so will robots. Homesteading is a pipe dream at this point. In order for that to be a reality for any significant number of humans, Mars will have to be transformed to a planet damn near identical to Earth. We can’t even homestead the ocean floor in any meaningful way. Hell, realistically can’t even be done in Antarctica. Who the hell wants to really live in such an inhospitable place? Maybe someday, it’ll be worth it. Get back to me in 100 years. What’s the hurry, really? Until then, get your Mars yayas in scifi books.
Anne Laurie
I’m with you, DougJ! The day will come when “we”, meaning humans, are ready to take the next big step into the universe. But there are so many more pressing projects, scientific and social, that demand all our financial & intellectual resources right now. As Mother Nature might phrase it: No trips to the Mars mall until we’ve done our homework and cleaned up our room (and, yes, She will be checking our results)!
2th&nayle
I suggest we wait a little while until we’re able to genetically engineer human space travelers designed to withstand the rigors of long term voyages and the otherwise harsh environments their likely to encounter. Or we could just send flying monkeys!
freelancer
JREF President Phil Plait Ph.D., from almost a year ago:
and then two months ago in the NYPost:
END PHIL
*******
ME: We can do both. But I’m skeptical we’re on Mars by 2060. First we need to be able to spend the resources to establish a permanent place on the Moon. From there, we learn the ability for long term space exploration and it is from there that we go out to meet the Universe. FUWP, also.
sitnam
We can’t let the robots meet Jebus first! Jebus lives in the sky!
Nellcote
Like there’s not enough space junk floating around now. There’s got to be something wrong with having to time shuttle lift-offs to avoid getting hit with it.
Kineslaw
I thought Babylon 5 taught us that a colony on Mars would be nothing but trouble. Riots, independence, trouble with Psi Corps – Mars just isn’t worth it.
On the other hand, setting up a colony on the moon would be pretty cool and much easier.
freelancer
OT,
DougJ, Modded in the Beck freakout thread for unintentionally dropping the “boner-pill-that-no-one-speaks-of”. FML.
john b
there’s one thing to be said for manned missions over unmanned missions:
one manned mission could accomplish much more in a day than the mars rover did in its entire mission.
john b
also the shuttle program is already on the chopping block. if i understand correctly, it would cost a lot more to continue it just because plans have already been set into motion anticipating the end of the shuttle program in the next ?2? years.
LD50
Well, there goes one of my most reliable rules of life out the window right there. Bastard.
kwAwk
The article says we could be on the Mars by the 60th anniversary of Apollo 11, which would put it at 2029, twenty years from now.
$160 billion over 20 years is really only $8 billion a year. Only about 0.4% of our federal budget. Even at a trillion dollars it would put it at $50 billion a year.
Considering most of that money would be spent in the future the time value of money would put the costs at much lower than $1 trillion in todays money either way.
When it really isn’t all that expensive to do relatively why not do it? Somebody has to do it sometime, why not us? Hubble Telescopes and Mars Rovers are nice, but they don’t have the same intangible affect on people that putting a man on Mars would. Pride in country and accomplishment. Pride in the human spirit. All things that need to be considered.
LD50
@Ben:
I agree. Landing people on Mars will be a marvelous excuse not to give Americans health care. We’d be spending a trillion dollars for a lot of really cool trivia, and colonizing any place other than Earth is way far off into the absurdly distant future, if EVER. Let’s spend money trying not to fuck up Earth.
LD50
A trillion dollars for intangible effect?
Ty Lookwell
We’re not going to do it alone or anytime soon, certainly not before 2040 (my hunch is closer to 2050) and almost certainly as part of a very large, awkward multinational effort. But by that time, a good chunk of the world’s population will have already “visited” via virtual-reality gear and mobile, autonomous robots.
Desert Rat
But how else will we secure Earth from the threat of white apes, and red and gray martians if we don’t invade Mars?
/Edgar Rice Burroughs.
LD50
@Desert Rat: What’ll we do if we go to Mars and find a half-buried Statue of Liberty there?
Nylund
Both my parents are retired NASA employees. Very high ranking ones who worked on projects involving Mars and permanent space colonies at very high levels (ie, members of the SES, a medal from a US president, etc.). In short, people with directly experience appropriate for this question (although admittedly, they are old, retired, and a bit out of the NASA loop these days).
I’m pretty sure if you were to ask one of them their opinion the answer would go something like this:
“Its a giant waste of time, energy, and money that wouldn’t result in any scientific information that couldn’t be gotten for a fraction of the cost with an unmanned project and is little more than a scam by Houston to get more funding funneled their way.”
I could be wrong, but that’s the impression I’ve gathered from decades worth of NASA talk over dinner.
I’d be happy to ask them if anyone is interested.
Robertdsc-iphone
As a kid, I loved the space program. The Shuttles were built near my home. I boned up on the history & knew much about things that happened way back when.
Nowadays, though, going to Mars seems a bit off for me when we’re flat broke & owe the Chinese so much money. That’s the depressing reality.
Of course, if we did go, I’d enjoy the trip. Seeing the Stars & Stripes on the Red Planet would be a treat. Incidentally, my iPhone’s wallpaper at the moment is a shot of the Sun from Mars. Neat.
Anne Laurie
Back in the late 1960s, C. Northcote Parkinson, economist, explained that humanity’s problem understanding why “saving the global ecology” was not optional lay in our distant origins. At some level, our arboreal monkey-brains still expect anything we “discard” to disappear forever into the leaf-litter far below; and still believe that once we’ve ravaged our current home-tree of every last edible/useable scrap, we will just leap effortlessly to the next leafy bonanza. This is, of course, oversimplified… but I still find it a useful analogy. Alas, Mars is a tree past our leaping, and once we get there we’re not liable to find the fruit to our present tastes.
There’s actually a pretty good Japanese anime, PLANETES, based on the adventures of a near-future space service tasked with the unglamorous job of collecting space crap before it can destroy valuable satellites, space shuttles, etc. Of course, what’s supposed to be a last-ditch “Dwight Schrute luzer” fallback career for the main leads rapidly develops into a multiplanetary political thriller. The last couple of episodes fall to pieces badly, but if you grew up reading Heinlein’s YA novels you’ll probably enjoy the series as a whole.
2th&nayle
@Desert Rat: And Tribbles!
kwAwk
‘A trillion dollars for intangible effect?’
Advertisers in the US spent $156 billion in 2008 alone to achieve an intangible affect; product promotion.
Certainly we can spend a trillion over 20 years to achieve something more meaningful.
Ripley
I vote we send Glenn Beck to Uranus.
It had to be said.
2th&nayle
@Anne Laurie: That’s a very interesting theory and it may also explain why I can’t get my grandson to pick up after himself. He’s too busy leaping to the next tree. Food for thought! Thx
Derek
“Wait till we’ve solved our problems here.”
“Earth First.”
Please. There will *ALWAYS* be higher priorities we should tackle here on earth. There will always be screwed up health care. There will always be wars. There will always be economies in trouble. There will always be poverty and disease. There will always be corrupt businesses and governments.
So let’s wait to go to Mars until we have solved everything here! /rolleyes
Well, in that case we may as well wait for the Rapture to take us to the heavens, because nothing here is gonna get solved any time soon, and putting off Mars won’t speed it up. If we’d waited till all the problems of the 60’s were solved before going to the Moon, we never would have left low earth orbit.
Yes, It will be crazy expensive, and technical issues abound. For example, the Martian atmosphere is really too thin to use a parachute for human landing without crushing all the bones in the capsule. A powered descent like Apollo to the moon (that is, using a rocket to slow down) would require more fuel than is feasible. This is a huge problem… but these brilliant women and men are working on solving it and they will someday.
For Example: Do you like YOUTUBE? The technology that it uses came about because of the “failed” Galileo probe to Jupiter. The antenna jammed on opening, and as a result it could only transmit data at like 3% of the expected speed. So what did these guys at NASA do? They freaking invented streaming video. If they did that for a robotic mission, imagine the shit they’re gonna come up with to get humans to Mars.
But for crying out loud, I’m in my mid 30’s, and in my lifetime nobody has ever gone to the moon. That’s crap. We should have been back there already, and on our way to Mars long ago. We’re not in debt because of Apollo or the Shuttle or Hubble or the ISS. We’re in debt because of wars and problems here on earth. But no. “Earth First.”
Shortsighted.
Problems here to solve? Yes. But if we wait to solve everything here first before going to Mars, we’ll never get there.
If not now, when? (2025)
If not us, who? (China, on our dime anyway, so it may as well be our flag.)
It’s worth it.
Ty Lookwell
Nylund –
please ask them. Better yet, have them e-mail/text you their thoughts and paste them here, I would love to read what they have to say.
Anne Laurie
… assuming that the first, or the sixth, “lost” human crew didn’t draw enough of an outcry to shut down the program indefinitely. If the Apollo 13 astronauts hadn’t made it back safely, there was talk at the time of cancelling all manned missions for the foreseeable future, despite the need to keep America pre-eminent in the Space Race(tm). Even the loss of unmanned Mars landers made a lot of politically-powerful people call for eliminating “wasteful, profitless” missions altogether.
Comrade Kevin
@kwAwk:
They’re wasting their own money.
malraux
Arguments of the form “we shouldn’t do X because the money would be better spent on Y” offer the fallacy of the false dilemma. Nothing in particular stops us from spending 2 trillion over some number of decades getting both health care and mission to mars.
Personally, I’d prefer the space program focus on a space elevator first, as that greatly reduces the cost of all other space ventures.
Nylund
OK, I’ll ask, but it might be a day or so before I get a response (they’re very active retirees!). I’ll post it to this thread for those that bother to come back and check.
I will state that they are scientists, not engineers, so they look at things from the perspective of scientific value, not engineering advancements that may be made along the way.
If you could acquire the same scientific knowledge at a fraction of the price (and much quicker) with an unmanned project, they’d be all for it. They wouldn’t think that just because the engineers might come up with some cool stuff along the way is a good justification…they’d there are plenty of other projects with more scientific merit to pursue and whose to say that what the engineers come up with for that would be any less cool? Yes the YouTube example given earlier was cool, but also entirely random. It is hardly a valid criteria for picking one NASA project over the other. You don’t choose a vastly more expensive and scientifically equal project just in the hopes that it might possibly, randomly, lead to neater feats of engineering than the equally scientifically valid, but much cheaper and quicker project (after all, the jammed antenna that led to YouTube might’ve come from the quick and cheap project!).
2th&nayle
@Anne Laurie: Damn good point! It’s not as if we haven’t suffered casualties aplenty in our rather meager efforts in space thus far. But, I think the shuttle catastrophes, as well as our earth bound mishaps, have steeled the American public conscience to the deadly dangers that space travel represents. It would seem that, at least in part, Americans have accepted the deaths of our armed forces in Iraq/Afstan as some how acceptable losses. Well, as long as they aren’t the ones who are actually sustaining those losses. Don’t you think?
Warren Terra
Manned spaceflight (as opposed to ground-based work to further manned spaceflight) hasn’t accomplished a darn thing other than to tell us a very little bit about human physiology in microgravity, with three exceptions: sample return from the moon (which could now be done better and much cheaper with robots), fixing the Hubble (cool, but actually more expensive than replacing it), and of course the big one, propaganda. I’m not slighting the propaganda: all those latter-day monkey missions doubtless made it possible to rally public support for some genuine science, and inspired a lot of kids into all branches of science. But the scientific impact has been nil, and the policy impact has often been lousy (witness the pointless space station, the shuttle that discards two boosters and a fuel tank and must be essentially rebuilt for each flight, at a cost that dwarfs a disposable rocket of similar capacity, especially with the wasted effort of lifting the whole shuttle, and the ignorant notion that it makes sense to stage a Mars mission, however bootless, from on the moon instead of from Earth orbit).
Anyone purporting to believe that we have any clue of how to colonize Mars or even the moon is invited to point out the successful closed-environment demonstration project in some desert or on some tundra, supporting colony life with an input of sunlight, water, and rock dust – as if we could even deliver such a project once knowing how to build it.
For more regular commentary on the insane wastefulness of putting more jet pilots in orbit, see the columns and occasional media appearances of Bob Park.
Comrade Kevin
@Nylund: Thanks, I’ll be interested to read what their response is.
Nylund
But the unmanned mission would get there DECADES before the manned mission, and once there, stay a lot longer. That’d more than make up for the lost amount of daily productivity.
cosanostradamus
.
Considering that the Earth will eventually be destroyed or become uninhabitable, it would be a good idea to have another place for humans and their pets and burger-animals to live. Otherwise, no more burgers, anywhere in the universe. And that’s a long way to go without a burger.
Also, there might not be any girls out there. No smart ones, anyways. So we should clone some of these ones: Cosie award winning bloggerettes. You’ll thank me later.
.
Chuck Butcher
I think it would be pointlessly shortsighted to totally cancel an effort, the money spent on scientists and engineers working on solving the problems would pay itself back in advanced technology but the actual doing of it is necessarily quite a ways off.
What we have available in the near future all results in a hit and scoot approach yielding little other than bragging rights. We need propulsion systems we do not have, we need life support systems we don’t have, we need a launch or multiple launch system we don’t have. You cannot throw a vehicle system required from Earth in one shot and space assembly is hopelessly complicated with today’s means.
There are a multitude of systems to be modeled and solved and the bitch of that is that solutions in any system will require revamps of others. Given the time scale many system’s solutions will be obsolete well before the whole thing is worked out requiring more re-do’s.
It is worth doing but not as an Apollo type push.
Vincent
People always act like it’s impossible to do both, have manned space missions and take care of stuff on Earth. Here’s an idea. If we scaled back our military spending then we can do both!
As for this idea that we can always do it some time in the future, when will that time be? There will always be a reason to put space travel off unless you expect the world to become a utopia sometime soon. We would never have reached the moon with an attitude like that.
I think it’s a damned shame that not only can we not get back to the moon, soon we won’t be able to leave the planet at all. No, I wouldn’t trade health care reform for manned space travel but that’s a false dichotomy I don’t accept.
pseudonymous in nc
It’s the rational vs. irrational, isn’t it? The Shuttle has been in its boondoggle phase for a long time: it basically flies to service the ISS, another make-work project. (Hubble, on the other hand, is a gift that keeps giving.) But even the boondoggle Shuttle missions get people interested in space, and voyages of discovery — with people — capture the imagination.
You can’t discount that. I still remember the whacking great info packet that NASA sent, free of charge, to a kid at my school on the other side of the pond around the time of the first Columbia launch in 1981. I’m sure other kids had the same delight and fascination, because I have contemporaries who are now research astronomers and astrophysicists and were inspired by the Shuttle.
It certainly doesn’t have to be manned missions after the Shuttle is retired. But it has to be the kind of inspirational stuff that’ll have kids spending hours on the NASA website instead of Facetubing.
srv
I don’t think spending a trillion on “could” makes any more sense than war “could” bring Jeffersonian Democracy to the ME.
As someone who worked on the shuttle program, and left b/c I wouldn’t work on ISS, these programs aren’t providing the bang for buck. Give $1B a year to Burt Rutan and we’ll all be going to space in 10 years.
Wile E. Quixote
The hypocrisy of liberals vis a vis the space program never ceases to amaze me. Everyone here is shitting themselves over spending a trillion dollars to go to Mars because we might not get health care because of that. But where’s the outrage over the 20 billion dollars a year we piss away through the USDA for farm subsidies. These subsidies distort prices on the world market, place third world commodity producers at an unfair disadvantage thus increasing poverty, encourage wasteful and environmentally destructive farming methods (it’s estimated that for every pound of corn harvested in the US a pound of topsoil washes down the Mississippi), produce vast amounts of crap that we don’t need (ethanol, high fructose corn syrup) and fucks over American consumers by transferring money from taxpayers to wealthy farmers and agribusiness conglomerates.
20 billion dollars a year would buy a fuck of a lot of health care. If we went out and purchased health insurance policies for unemployed individuals on the private market at $5,000 a year that would insure 4 million people. Strangely enough though criticizing the USDA seems to be off limits. No liberal has ever said “OMFG, all of the money going through the USDA to Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland means that we have less money to spend on health care, or social programs or education funding”. I’d really like to know why it is that the stupid, wasteful, environmentally destructive and irredeemably fucked up shit that the USDA subsidizes is off limits and never criticized in terms of what else might be done with the money but *any* proposed increase in funding for NASA is always fair game and will have stupid fucking flat-earthers coming out of the woodwork and squealing about how “we have to solve our problems on earth before we explore space” or other such bullshit.
joeyess
Try to experience and study Hawaii without going there yourself. You’ll find it an empty and antiseptic experience.
We cannot appreciate our existence, nor our infinite smallness in this universe without actually doing the work of exploring space with humans.
There is no poetry in robotic exploration. Going there and capturing photos, samples and such with robots just doesn’t do the human spirit any good.
We have to go.
monkeyboy
@shecky:
Actually I recall a scenario from several years ago that involved sending people to Mars where there was no way to bring them back. There were a surprising number of people who volunteered for that.
Not that it makes any economic or scientific sense. But some people think the romanticism and sense of adventurous achievement makes it worth while.
Viva BrisVegas
One thing to remember, those little robots are going to get a lot better very quickly, but they aren’t making better astronauts yet.
Send men and women to the moon by all means. Learn how to live in space, but do it 1.5 light seconds away. Any further and the Internet gets unusable. A radio telescope on the farside of the moon would probably be the most important astronomical development since Hubble.
shocking
OT – Check out this episode of Australia’s the Chaser’s War on Everything – it has some rather amusing skits which include John Yoo being ambushed in class, a rather ridiculous incident outside Cheney’s residence and a few other things which might be of interest.
abc.net.au/tv/chaser/#/latestepisode/chaser_09_03_06/
Andy K
Look out, Milky Way, the Earthlings are coming to overpopulate and pollute a habitable planet near you!
I’m all for space probes, Hubble-like (in what they can do, not necessarily from where they do it) telescopes and robotic explorers- the knowledge we can gain might help us learn some things that will help to straighten out what we’ve done to our own planet over the last 10,000 years. After we fix our own problems, then maybe we invoke Henry the Navigator.
Gravenstone
@jp2:
Fixt (I hope)
I’m torn. The long time science and sci-fi geek in me screams in giddy joy at the prospect on Man on Mars. The curmudgeonly pragmatist harrumphs about time,cost and staggering engineering and physiological challenges.
I think Chuck Butcher has the right of it, continue the manned pursuit at a relatively low level of intensity to work through the engineering challenges. In parallel, ramp up the unmanned efforts to push the actual planetary science.
**sigh** strikethrough fail in the block quote…
theo
Smarter concern trolls, please.
Most liberals despise ADM, Monsanto and Big Corn, and would favor redistributing farm subsidies exclusively to family farmers, preferably with some conservation/ecological component to the subsidy.
theo
No one’s mentioned that the Hubble itself is now pretty obsolete, since really big (like 30 meter) ground-based telescopes using adaptive optics have really surpassed its performance for visible wavelengths. There’s a recent article in National Geographic that does a good job of explaining these developments.
Of course, Hubble was still a good idea when it was built. We got some awesome pictures and data. The success of adaptive optics couldn’t have been anticipated at the time Hubble was built (or even repaired, really), and optics wasn’t exactly a fast-moving field.
Also, many other wavelengths are still best observed in space, either because they’re blocked by the atmosphere or because we need a really long baseline — like from one side of earth orbit to the other.
imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/emspectrum.html
Taylor
Spend the trillion dollars on the space elevator. That’s the future of mankind in space, if it has any.
Chuck Butcher
The two main esoteric R&D drivers are military and space and both yield large usable developements. I will happily admit to finding space programs friendlier to living things.
The fairly simple reason this is the case is that there is no general usage product being envisioned, it is goal oriented without being utilitarian motivated. The outflow of usable technology is natural if unintentional, dealing with endeavors at the outskirts of human potentials is aimed at human usage and elements will prove generally useful due to that very element.
Robotics are necessarily a different deal, nobody cares greatly how long it takes one to get to Mars, it doesn’t need to eat or breath or sleep and can survive inhuman forces being applied to them. Solutions aimed at human participation guarantee human related outflows coming from the outer edges of technology rather than the conservative business oriented R&D.
None of that implies that money is in endless supply or that getting it doesn’t mean something else goes wanting. We could talk until blue in the face about what could be or deserves to be cut, I frankly believe there are whacking large cuts coming in the not too distant future brought on solely by our debt levels. It is at least that if not taxes as well. To paraphrase, a few billions here and there enough times and you’re talking about real money…
Darkrose
@Kineslaw:
Yeah, but we get Garibaldi, and he’s awesome!
Earl
More robots until we can get that right consistently at the very least, I would think…
Napoleon
Please warn us when providing links to the WaPo. With their publishing of an OpEd by Caribou Barbie it is clear they have gone full blown conservative and I have finally decided to quit reading the WaPo and running up their web click count.
grumpy realist
Space elevator first, plz. No large-scale movement into space will occur unless we figure out how to drastically drop cost to orbit. Space elevator probably close enough to being feasible that we’d be really, really stupid to not try to get it.
Also note–> whatever country manages to get up a space elevator will probably dominate space. One reason why Japan is interested. Dunno about China.
Manned vs. unmanned. Can sort of see this played out with the Japanese/ESA vs. US space program. Both Japan and ESA have for years concentrated on unmanned space and at far less the cost of a manned mission.
For science, go unmanned. For cool geekiness and getting kids interested in science, go manned.
MikeJ
We should probably go eventually, but I don’t see what the hurry is to send humans. If you want to keep humans on Mars long term, there are simply too many things that we need to be able to do a lot better. I imagine we’ll have a better grasp of how to do it in the next few hundred years.
Arachnae
Weighing in on the ‘go and go now’ side. Derek’s right – there will ALWAYS be ‘better things to spend the money on’ and in the meantime, our entire gene pool is sitting on one increasingly fragile rock.
scarshapedstar
Oh lord, are we still complaining about him taking Michelle out on a date?
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
B-b-but, think of all the OIL we could find there! All those bacterium decomposing for billions of years? And we wouldn’t have to fight anyone for it, as long as we get there first.
And it would cost less than the Iraq war/occupation.
.
angulimala
Send the sick people to Mars.
Problem Solved, Bitches!!!!!
MarsFrist
Losing our manned space program, which would be the result of not having a destination (much like the program we have now), would be the most obvious sign that America is truly in decline.
Many of us got into science and engineering because of the excitement and inspiration of NASA and the space program. My grandfather, although not even a high school graduate, was keenly interested in the early manned space program and some of my earliest, and fondest, memories of him are of the two of us watching Gemini mission launches on TV. I clearly remember the Apollo launches and TV coverage, and most vividly remember running back and forth from the TV in my grandparents house to the front porch, updating my clearly disinterested aunts and uncles during the Apollo 11 moon landing. I could not fathom how they could not want to know about such a momentous event. Another vivid memory is of asking my parents to wake me, even though it was a school night, to let me know if the Apollo 13 astronauts made it around the moon to return back to earth during the rescue. My parents were not very interested themselves, but they were always encouraging of my interests (I was always allowed to stay up as late as I wanted, even on school nights, to watch launches…interminable holds and all!). I read every space, rocket, and astronomy book that our small Catholic elementary school library had at least 20 times.
Through junior high and high school, “astronaut” was still my preferred career choice, although that eventually changed into “scientist-astronaut” as my experiences with physics, chemistry and math accumulated, and my goal then was to be the first geologist on Mars (okay…maybe it still is). I am a professional scientist today (not in the space business), and many, many more of my colleagues have similar stories. So does Barack Obama!
Being from western PA, I really have enjoyed John’s blog (pets and all). But, this post (and unfortunately John is not alone in holding this opinion) really rubs me the wrong way. As other comments have stated, space exploration is relatively cheap and the money “wasted” in space is really paying salaries of scientists, engineers, and skilled workmen who have good jobs right here in the US. I am sure that our piddly, low-earth-orbit manned program today still inspires kids to follow their dreams. If we take even that away, we are resigning ourselves to a future less bright and settling for less because of inconvenience. Don’t advocate taking away our dreams, John.
JGabriel
Comrade Kevin:
Seriously, Krugman and other economists are already saying we need a second stimulus. A really expensive program that fulfills humankind’s ancient wishes to explore the stars looks to me like a better way to achieve that than the usual solution – “let’s go to war!”
And, no, I don’t think a renewed space program will, all by itself, solve our economic problems, but it can be part of the solution.
Furthermore, we’ve successfully taken on major expenses and projects during times of crisis before. The initial program to go to the moon took place in the shadow of the Vietnam War; we bought Alaska in the middle of the Civil War; and during the Great Depression, we paid artists to paint murals create and other works of art, despite the lack of obvious utilitarian benefit.
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JGabriel
shecky:
Finally, a use for all that experience we’ve developed in global warming.
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Joseph Nobles
Why don’t we colonize Antarctica first? And the ocean and the Sahara, etc.? All of these would be great trial runs at colonizing Mars. Low Earth orbit – but not the Moon. Declare the Moon a Global Park Zone.
Robots for Mars for the foreseeable future. Humans will get to Mars eventually, but not right now.
DBrown
The trouble with sending humans to Mars is that the radiation threat is very near the max dose threshold for humans. Cosmic rays (a few GeV energy protons, low flux) and solar events (rare burt up to 400 MeV proton, high flux) and Mars surface neutron flux are very dangerous and can not easily be defeated (by current tech/design.)
The time peroid for a mission to Mars is over 978 days; rather long for a single mission.
Could it be done and with current rockets at a price we could afford? Maybe, but until people find a real need (possible alien life (microbes)) I just don’t see it.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Perhaps not, but it’s usually the smart way to bet.
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BR
The “Mars Direct” mission plan was estimated to cost a total of $55 billion over 10 years, which is peanuts in the scheme of things:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
Plus all the R&D that would go into it would surely stimulate the economy and maybe even create new industries.
JGabriel
cosanostradamus:
You must be a blast at parties, Mr. Optimist.
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JGabriel
MarsFrist:
Umm, I don’t know that Cole has ever written on the subject. Perhaps he has and I missed it, but this post is by DougJ.
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MarsFrist
JGabriel:
Sorry! I was so upset, I missed the byline! Apologies to John, too!
MikeJ
Mars direct is interesting, and probably the best way to go. However, for it to work you need to be able to land multiple missions safely very, very close together (like <1km).
The first steps in Mars direct all require landing multiple robot missions. Lets do that. Hell, lets do that and see if we can get robots back safely before we start worrying about sending water and oxygen humans.
Dennis-SGMM
Mars is a pretty inhospitable place for humans. For one, its atmosphere is around 95% carbon dioxide. For another, it gets so cold at the poles during the Martian winter that 25% of the carbon dioxide freezes into dry ice. A colony there would be an elaborate undertaking at the end of a years long supply chain. It could be done but, why? Let the robots explore for the moment. If they find something worth looking into then send the humans.
mistermix
@MarsFrist:
Oh, really? You mean that having a top-flight robotic program, sending back constant hi-res pictures and doing real science, would be an index of our decline? I doubt it.
Unless we come up with some way to speed space travel, the numbers for manned spaceflight just don’t work. It will take almost a year for a round-trip to Mars, versus about 8 days for the Moon. Anything past Mars (an asteroid? a moon of Jupiter?) would take years. The lack of a destination is based on physics, not on our national decline.
Grumpy Code Monkey
I remember the Apollo missions through the eyes of a six-year-old, so I’ve always had a somewhat romantic notion of space exploration.
Much as I would love to see manned missions to Mars in my lifetime, I cannot justify the cost wrt to unmanned missions. For the cost of one manned mission we could pepper Mars with rovers and satellites and explore the entire planet at once. Right now we’re exploring opposite sides of Mars concurrently with what are only second-generation rovers. The Mars Science Lab should cover more ground for a longer period of time.
Rovers and other robotic probes may be slow compared to humans, but they don’t have to carry massive amounts of food, water, and air, they don’t have to figure out what to do with their waste products, they can stay on site for years, they don’t get sick, and the don’t ever have to come home. They may occasionally get stuck in the mud, but it’s not a panic situation. Engineers can take their time to figure out what to do.
Sending people to do basic exploration is a waste of resources; use the unmanned probes to do the basic exploration, then send people to the most interesting sites. That basic survey process is going to take a few decades yet.
White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob)
Trillion bucks to explore a water-soaked planet?
Hell, for twenty bucks and a case of domestic beer, I’ll let NASA explore my basement.
ccham44
Why do we need to spend so much extra money to “inspire” when we could plow it into building bigger, better and faster robots, and end up doing more exploration in the same amount of time?
Furthermore, we built a machine that can explore other planets for us! Isn’t that pretty friggin’ cool? Can’t that inspire some kid to become an engineer and build his own robot?
Maybe if we keep doing that we’ll soon be able to use robotics for more than vacuuming our floors.
Keith G
In 2012, NASA plans a test on ISS of a plasma rocket engine. Such an engine would reduce travel time and fuel capasity needs. If this works out, both robotic and human travel to Mars will get significantly easier.
dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/08/07/plasma-rocket.html
DougJ
@Nylund
Ask them, I’d be curious to hear what they say.
Original Lee
@Wile E. Quixote: Not just liberals, but also conservatives won’t touch farm subsidies. I believe it’s a big blind spot because it has to do with food and our agrarian roots. The MSM helps keep the hidden costs hidden (unless some little white girl dies of pesticide poisoning), because the food industry pays for so much advertising. My kids had an exercise the last week of school, where they were asked to keep track of the commercials they saw on TV (i.e., what was being advertised). Kids’ programming is overwhelmingly subsidized by toys and food, but to my surprise, even early evening programming for adults (in our area) is 1/3 subsidized by food. That’s a lot of dollars to keep us from thinking about agricultural subsidies, I think.
john b
i would like to point out that any plan for a manned mission would naturally start with doing MANY unmanned missions as well.
hell manned mission plans might very well be a huge boon to the unmanned side of nasa which typically gets a very small portion of the fed budget.
Bob In Pacifica
Not one more dime for the manned Mars program until I get my flying car. I was promised that back at the 1964 Worlds Fair.
someguy
As one dinosaur said to the other, “fuck it. What are the odds of an asteroid or comet hitting earth anyhow? Besides, we have enough problems providing ferns and small lizzards for everybody to eat as it is.”
Justin
All other reasons aside, John, you have to remember how fragile life on Earth really is. One lucky shot from an asteroid, a temporary interruption in the Earth’s magnetic field, a massive solar flare, extreme climate change — any one of these things could wipe out the only life we know to exist (so far) in the universe. It might sound a bit sci-fi, but we need to learn how to survive in space and on other planets, because right now we still have all our eggs in one basket. Basically, if we don’t, extinction is not a matter of if but when.
Of course, maybe it should be put off a few years til we shore up the federal budget, but I’d definitely have to cast my vote in favor of sending people, not just robots.
Redshirt
The real key to going to the Moon and Mars is to get the Chinese to pay for it. But really, get them fully on board (with the Russians and Europeans and anyone else who wants to contribute) and then make a go of it.
If nothing else, establishing these types of cross-country working groups helps bring peace to this world.
For the record, I am all for manned missions to mars first, the moon as an alternative. AND, tons and tons of robotic missions. As said above, there’s no reason we cannot do both.
And perhaps in a world where all the great powers are working together is a world in which the USA can lower it’s defense budget enough to pay for these efforts.
mike in dc
Why not do both? Send the robots first, the people can follow a couple decades later. That should probably be the model to follow…robots first, people later. Ultimately, manned exploration of space has a great deal of value for humanity. If we can find a way to survive out there, it means our ultimate survival as a species is not completely tied to the survival of our planet (or even necessarily the survival of our solar system). As has been stated, while robots can do the job much more cheaply, humans can do multiple jobs relatively quickly. And we could see some spinoff technologies developed to overcome technical obstacles, possibly including medical and even genetic innovations.
I don’t really see a net upside to what would probably amount to ceasing our manned exploration of transorbital space for decades if not longer.
Original Lee
IIRC, the point of the ISS was to help us colonize the Moon. That should be next, not leapfrogging to Mars.
We should continue with basic climate studies (including studying the Sun) and with robot missions within the solar system, because these are relatively inexpensive and can be done collaboratively with scientists and engineers from other countries. However, one of the political problems with collaborative satellite and unmanned probe projects is that after the satellite or probe is built and launched, the maintenance, monitoring, data collection and analysis, etc., are quasi-fixed costs for the life of the satellite or probe. Take the difficulty NASA has in protecting the funding for the Hubble and multiply it by the number of participating countries to see some real fun budget battles (as we can see with the ISS). Building the satellites and probes is usually with solid funding, but the parts that make the satellites and probes valuable are usually paid for by soft money.
The beauty of big honkin’ manned missions (BHMMs) is that they are essentially one-shot efforts. They are inspiring, they employ lots of people for a fixed period of time, there are unforeseen tangible and intangible benefits, and funding-wise, each project is essentially a bunny in a boa – once the Congresscritters can be persuaded to swallow the huge price tag, the BHMMs are good to go (the SSC being one of the exceptions).
But until we get some cost savings from health care reform and can cut the military budget significantly, I am not a big fan of the Mars mission.
Paul in KY
We just don’t have the technology right now to safely send people to Mars. If we sent them now, it would be a suicide mission, IMO.
One day, I hope we do send some vols to Mars. Hope I’m alive to see it.
Robots are certainly much more cost effective than sending people.
Throwin Stones
@malraux: I listened to a story on the space elevator earlier this week. I hadn’t heard about it before, and am still trying to wrap my brain around it. Astrophysicist, I’m not.
Derek
Like I said before, China’s gonna go there on our leveraged dime on their terms… if we’re going to be funding a space program anyway, it may as well be our own.
Sloegin
We may get to the stars before we do anything with Mars.
You can’t terraform your way to a martian magnetic field.
kwAwk
That is the whole point. We’re not sending them now, we’re discussing sending them 20 years from now.
Comrade Dread
Forget Mars and get me a Mother****ing lightsaber already, would you?
BlizzardOfOz
@Anne Laurie,
What exactly are the “social projects” we can be working on? Electing more democrats so they can more effectively hand over trillions to Goldman Sachs? Space exploration is a much more egalitarian use of resources. Open factories in the south and midwest to get conservatives’ support.
lou
There was an article in the NY Times yesterday about just that.
Also, Neal deGrasse Tyson had an interesting piece on Nova Science Now the other day about an astronaut/scientist, Franklin Diaz, originally from Costa Rica working on a plasma rocket that could cut the trip to Mars from 500 days to 39. I think that’s pretty cool. Star Trek here we come!
Ceri B.
I grew up around NASA (JPL, in particular); Dad was an engineer there in the Deep Space Network. I have loved space exploration probably since before I could read.
I think that what we’re doing now with unmanned exploration is fantastic, and that increasing funding for it by a factor of two to five would pay off very handsomely, not just with good science but with spinoffs from the engineering involved in mission coordination, tool development, and so on.
I grew up with the vision of an expanding human presence, spreading from Earth throughout the solar system and beyond. I saw this as crucial for humanity’s near- and long-term well-being. But the Challenger disaster, and the exposure of the social situation that led to it, and subsequent calamities have changed my mind.
I don’t see that the US as a nation has much to offer anymore when it comes to human missions. The Apollo mission was always a dead end, relying on exploiting the very margins of the feasible and a bunch of gimmicks. And since then, there have been fundamental things wrong with manned project management. Really, I think that the future of human presence in space will involve private efforts, starting with the current edge-of-space suborbital tourism and building up from there. I’d like to see the US encourage that, or at least not get in its way.
Brett
The main advantage with one-way colonization attempts to Mars is that Mars at least has water in ice form that could be melted and used, along with a whole host of other resources. The Moon, while a lot closer, doesn’t have those advantages – you’d have to import all of your water there.
Joanie Abalone
Give mars to the robots, and the next thing you know there will be flying saucers landing on the white house lawn.
We can’t let the machines win.
slippytoad
@Anne Laurie
If only the Iraqi Occupation had operated by that rule, we would have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
Phoebe
“Just because Gregg Easterbrook agrees doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
That really needed to be said.
slippytoad
@lou
I said in another thread that I’d like to see Obama issue a challenge — instead of daring us to land a man on Mars by the end of the next decade, he should dare us to land a man on Mars for less than $100 billion, by the end of the next decade.
And make concrete financial prizes available for companies that figure out how to shorten the trip and reduce the cost and make space exploration and habitation sustainable so we stop having this stupid argument of “we have to solve ALL OUR PROBLEMS HERE before we can leave the Earth.”
Which, by the way, is the hands-down STUPIDEST argument for not exploring space that exists.
Chrynoble
The problem is there will ALWAYS be more pressing local problems to deal with rather than spending the money to go to mars.
There are soft benefits behind actual human exploration that, in my opinion, out weigh the cost of such missions.
Columbus could have taken his first look at the new world and said “Oh great, trees. I have never seen those before! Why the hell did we just waste our time sailing here?” before turning around and never coming back. I think we are better off because he didn’t.
As for humans vs robotics, you need to consider another factor: cycle time. If humans were stationed on Mars new experiments could be devised and implemented faster than waiting to launch a new rover every few years.
Nylund
For those that care, I got my first email back from my father (Former NASA semi-bigwig that worked on Apollo, Viking, Space Settlements, and Space Station). He got way off topic and just started talking about bureaucracy, budgets, committee meetings, fights between the old Bush/Texan crowd and the new Obama people. Boring gov’t stuff. I realized my question about a manned mission to Mars was too open ended.
If you have specific questions, you can email them to me and I’ll pass them on.
I can also forward on to anyone an interview he did about his NASA years so you can get a sense of what sort of questions he’d be qualified to answer. It all dates back to work in the 60’s and 70’s, so its old stuff, and, honestly, not that exciting of a read, nor am I really certain just how connected to the current NASA world he is in his retirement.
PS. NASA nerds might like some of the retro-70’s art work from the Space Settlement project he worked on. Large framed versions of these covered the walls of our house growing up and they always fascinated me.
ChrisZ
I’m very much in favor of us working to establish a permanent Moon base as our next big project. I’m not willing to sacrifice every other space-related program for it, but I think it’s something worth working towards. I don’t, however, see any reason to try going to Mars (we still don’t know how to shield astronauts for the journey so we have some major problems to figure out) before developing our other-world-living technology on the Moon first.
Wile E. Quixote
@theo
Hey, can we get some smarter liberals while we’re at it? I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine but liberals love them some farm subsidies, do the names Walter Mondale and William Proxmire ring any bells? These two upper midwest twats, who were regarded as heroes of progressivism, did everything they could to shut down funding for NASA while keeping all sorts of programs going so that dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota could continue to collect government subsidy checks. And enough of your stupid nonsense about “family farms”. Leftists and progressives spooge greasy loads all over themselves talking about “family farms” but I fail to see why “family farms” are any more deserving of subsidies than are family restaurants, family garages, family construction companies, etc. It might have escaped your attention, in fact I know it did, but the incredibly wasteful subsidy programs we have in place now were designed to help “family farms”, and anytime anyone criticizes our agricultural policies the image of the mythical “family farm” run by some Jeffersonian yeoman farmer (Jefferson was a slave-owning twat who never did any farming himself.) is invoked by the agricultural welfare queens as the reason why we need to keep shovelling money their way.
If Obama went out tomorrow and announced that he was doubling funding for NASA, for any program, manned or unmanned, there would be a huge outcry from liberal concern troll shitheads writing letters to the editor and OpEds about how we needed to fix things on earth before we fixed things in space, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. There was no such outcry the last time a farm bill was passed, and it was Democrats from midwest states who helped kill the cap on farm subsidies. It was Democrats in the House who told Bush they were going to override his veto on the last farm bill, which was regarded by everyone outside of the agricultural sector as being a bloated piece of shit. Just for once I’d like to see the fucking liberal concern trolls who are so pissily concerned about spending money on space exploration because it means that we won’t be able to spend it on social programs get off of their lazy, stupid and hypocritical asses and show the same concern over our agricultural policy, which is not only regressive but has serious negative environmental, trade and economic externalities as well. This would include holding members of their own party accountable for voting for these policies. I’m not holding my breath for it though, that would require real work and commitment, bitching about NASA and engaging in concern trollery about “solving problems on earth before we explore space” is much easier.
Sean
Interestingly, many the technologies we need to develop in order to live on Mars are exactly the technologies we need to live sustainably on Earth:
Compact Fusion reactors, micro-manufacturing, 100% water recycling, 100% waste-recycling and a deep understanding biology and ecosystems are all pre-requisites to living on Mars.
They are also prerequisites to living on Earth… with 6 billion people.
A Martian colony is probably not the most cost-efficient way to achieving all that, but the fact that the smallest technical failure means instant death does have a way of focusing the mind.
-Sean